I have been looking for a way to describe most of the guidance provided by those in the financial services industry. I’ve struggled with the best way to put it.

However, the quotable Warren Buffet provided a great take on how investors waste money on investment advice. In this case, he is referring to “sophisticated” investors. However it applies to everyone. It’s happening as well with those we work with – middle class individuals and smaller organizations.

Here it is:

“Supposedly sophisticated people, generally richer people, hire consultants, and no consultant in the world is going to tell you ‘just buy an S&P index fund and sit for the next 50 years.’ You don’t get to be a consultant that way. And you certainly don’t get an annual fee that way. So the consultant has every motivation in the world to tell you, ‘this year I think we should concentrate more on international stocks,’ or ‘this manager is particularly good on the short side,’ and so they come in and they talk for hours, and you pay them a large fee, and they always suggest something other than just sitting on your rear end and participating in the American business without cost. And then those consultants, after they get their fees, they in turn recommend to you other people who charge fees, which… cumulatively eat up capital like crazy.”

And he had more:

“And the consultants always change their recommendations a little bit from year to year. They can’t change them 100% because then it would look like they didn’t know what they were doing the year before. So they tweak them from year to year and they come in and they have lots of charts and PowerPoint presentations and they recommend people who are in turn going to charge a lot of money and they say, ‘well you can only get the best talent by paying 2-and-20,’ or something of the sort, and the flow of money from the ‘hyperactive’ to what I call the ‘helpers’ is dramatic.”

I haven’t come across a better summation of what I have learned about the value of investment advice. Keep your money. Set up a well diversified portfolio of extremely low-cost index funds and…that’s it!